RS

MEMBER DIARY

US Should Leave Syria Alone

Well, here we go again. An uprising and subsequent government crackdown in Syria are being seen as an opportunity to “liberate” another Middle Eastern nation from an authoritarian regime, this one run by the al-Assad family.

But America should keep out of Syrian affairs. From Iraq to Syria to Libya to Egypt, all of these nations were better off before the US and the ‘world community’ started to intervene.

Referring to the Syrian crackdown in which many civilians are reported to have been killed, CNN.com reported:

‘(Syrian president Bashar) Al-Assad has denied targeting civilians, saying his forces are after “terrorists” and foreign fighters who are bent on destabilizing Syria.’

Rational observers know that al-Assad is correct, that first he certainly is not targeting civilians. Wouldn’t this cause him big problems in world opinion?

Of course. And so the big issue here is this: Who actually is leading the uprising?

And the fact is that the people now spearheading the revolt against the Syrian government are not ordinary Syrians – perhaps some are involved – but are largely well-armed radical Muslims and foreign fighters, funded by Iran, who are part of a region-wide movement to turn the Middle East into an extremist Islamic bastion with repressive sharia laws.

These are the same terrorists and foreigners who destabilized Iraq and killed American soldiers for years.

And these extremists are using a standard terrorist strategy – provoking the Syrian military into responding then retreating into civilian areas, with civilians getting caught in the crossfire and killed. This provides the terrorists with the international media sympathy that they desire.

Indeed we cannot rely on World Media reports to get the truth about Syria because these media have shaded all the events in the Middle East against American interests, for instance hailing the deposing of pro-US leader Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, which is leading to chaos and economic mayhem, as predicted.

And rest assured that Syria is much better off under the al-Assad family than it would be under extremist Islamic rule.

I was recently talking with a Syrian Christian who now lives here in the United States. He told me that the World Media coverage of the Syrian uprising is being badly skewed to make al-Assad look bad and to make it appear that all Syrians support the uprising.

He told me that the al-Assad family has been keeping a secular Syria peaceful for decades and allowing the free religious practice of Christians who are about 10% of the nation’s population of 22 million.

He added that Christians, Muslims and even some Jews practice their religion openly, side-by-side, in Syria under the al-Assad regime and have for decades.

He said that Syria is not a police state in that there even are drugs and prostitution, that the government does not control the whole society down to the street level like totalitarians do, in Iran for instance.

He added that if the revolting extremists are allowed to seize power from al-Assad that they will establish a radical Islamic theocracy and that Christians in Syria will be threatened and harmed as they are being threatened, harmed and killed in Iraq today. And like they have been threatened, harmed and killed in Egypt even under Mubarak who was deposed in February 2011.

The Syria story is a replay of recent events. Egypt’s stability, openness, relative prosperity and peaceful coexistence with its neighbors – particularly Israel – is now fading with the uprising there that was cheered by Obama and Hillary Clinton.

And the extremist Muslims who were the real force behind the ‘Arab Spring’ in Egypt have since won big victories in elections there and want to, by sheer numbers, turn Egypt into a closed Islamic police state like Iran.

Egypt for decades was a secular pro-Western nation with a thriving tourist economy that brought some prosperity to many Egyptians. All religions were allowed to practice openly.

Already, however, tourism has plummeted after some tourists were taken hostage. Meanwhile news reports of violence in the streets of Cairo are discouraging visitors.

At the same time the 8 million Coptic Christians, who have been in Egypt for centuries longer than Muslims have, finding themselves increasingly fearful as an Islamic Egyptian regime, allied with the Muslim Brotherhood, appears to be poised to grow in power.

In Libya US/NATO airstrikes helped the rebels overthrow Khaddafi. And Khaddafi was certainly a bad person. But that is a bad part of the world and now we very well may get much worse. Because Muslim extremists are plotting to take over Libya too. After all, we know that radicals were a significant part of the uprising against Khaddafi. Don’t think that we have heard the last from Libya.

In Iraq Saddam Hussein was keeping peace and stability through dictatorial means in a dangerous part of the world. But the American invasion disrupted the entire nation and its economy, killed more than 4,000 American soldiers, injured tens of thousands of American soldiers, and caused the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis.

In Iraq Christians have been silenced, cowed, dispersed or have fled the nation since Saddam Hussein was deposed by American forces. Because without Hussein’s grip on power, Iraq has seen chaos with hundreds of terrorist attacks, some of them specifically targeting Christians and their churches.

And the Iraq conflict is far from over. Shia Muslims, many of them radical, are slowly taking over Iraq numerically and probably will negate any of that nation’s move toward democracy. Several major car bombings just since the recent departure of American troops have shown that the nation is very fragile and easily can descend into chaos and extremism if certain radical forces put on the pressure.

And now we have a revolt in Syria with the United States and the ‘world community’ speaking against the al-Assad government and talking about removing al-Assad under the guise of “liberation”. This is like the way that Obama helped the rebels in Libya and supported the uprising against Mubarak.

The US should leave Syria alone and allow al-Assad to fight the terrorists and foreigners. According to my Syrian friend, the nation is mostly peaceful and the conflict is generally limited to small areas where the terrorist element is strong. But in typical leftist fashion the World Media are focusing on these areas as if they represent the whole country.

Naturally there is one major Middle Eastern nation – Iran – where there was a very brief uprising in 2009 that was quickly crushed and that has never been heard from again.

Because that uprising was not being led by armed Muslim extremists or by foreign fighters. It was a genuine citizens’ revolt against the Iranian police state.

And while there are sanctions against Iran for its nuclear weapons program, the Obama administration and the ‘world community’ ignored the revolt because it was a genuine uprising aimed at unseating the radical Iranian government.

Today, however, the ‘world community’, the leftist World Media and American foreign policy are all geared toward deposing secular and pro-American governments and favoring the rise of extremist Muslims all over the Middle East.

This all began in 1979 when Democrat US president Jimmy Carter intentionally abandoned the pro-American Shah of Iran, leading to the Islamic police state of today controlled by radical Shia mullahs.

Please visit my blog at www.nikitas3.com for more conservative insights. And enjoy the lively new Arts section.